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Topic: Recruitments (Read 13272 times)

@gerbel:we are no way close to recording voiceacting, but just for fun, would you do an indy voice and record it and upload to soundcloud or similar for us to listen please We also have Maverick Gunn, indys archaelogist enemy or a sherpa at the beginning in tibet.

@alliethehamsternice to read you and your offer. I listened through your soundcloud and it's pretty impressive, I like the witch and the automated phone voice We have no female roles in the beginning chapters, but later elisabeth appears, she is the indy lady for this adventure, give it a try

I'm a trained musician, professional programmer and father of two, fond of LucasFilm/Arts AGs of the Golden Age.I always cultivated the dream of bringing my own AG to life and with a friend I started working on something the last year. We spent some time on game definition document, puzzles schema and storylines, then he also became father and our endeavor ground to a halt.

Creating a whole new AG while being an 8pm warrior is very difficult, so when I stumbled on your project I decided that I could pursue my dreams helping you instead of "wasting" energy alone.

So here I am. I can provide coding and music. I'm educated (not self-thought) in both coding and music and do both since my teens. You can visit my site to hear my songwriting for both my main genre and some soundtrack experiments.I can also provide Italian translations and Linux testing (I code AGS in a Windows environment but basically live in debian/Ubuntu, so I can run the game and test it out).I consider my English decent enough to provide the bulk of dialogues or narrative for revision by a mother-toungue, if this can be of any help.

Sadly I'm not a visual artist, so I can't help that much with pixel art or backgrounds.

I'd really like to get a grasp on what's the current state of the project... have you got a clear task board? How communication happens? Are there a VCS repository for contributions? The more solid the productive process, the most I can make out of my spare time

Mainly, you're asking about the state of the project. My answer will baffle you, but bear with me : It's been several years since the project has started, and yet it's still only less than 20% achieved. Don't run away yet! That's due to its participative nature; people come and go and it causes the overall knowledge and vision to be very volatile. And yet there are good chances that the project gets finished! Have you ever heard of "Indiana Jones and the fountain of Youth"? They started 15 years ago, and yet they're not too far from finishing their game. We're hoping to finish faster than them by trying to harness contributions from more people (it's slower to integrate new assets but each asset gets produced faster).

In the case of our project, it has followed the same chatic road as fan games : At first, there was a vision (rough, movie-style scenario) by a person. Then after several years, he managed to put a demo together. Then the game started scaling up and hit some sort of glass ceiling regarding its tools. Now we're on the verge of overcoming those difficulties and we're in th process of carefully turning the storyline into an actual set of puzzles and locations that make sense from a point n' click perspective.

What is your favorite adventure game? As you can guess we're fans of Fate of Atlantis But we're trying to take the best ideas from more modern games.

Anyways, your contributions (especially music at this stage) are very welcome.

My questions now : - do you know Adventure Game Studio aka AGS? - if yes, can you script in AGS?- when you make music, what's your process? -do you use electronic tools? Like, stuff that turns partitions into MIDI, or do you use an actual keyboard, etc.?- would you be willing to share your work documents with us? Maybe we culd salvage some of your ideas to make Seven Cities of Gold (7CoG for short) a better game?

First of all, I want to point out that my main concern about the state of the project was not the advancement state (not scared of long-running projects), but the structure of the process and communication. I have past experiences in fan-projects (not videogames) that went awry and eventually wrecked not for lack of effort or skills but for lack of organization. That's why I asked.

I'll try my best to reply to your questions:

- I forgot to mention that I already know AGS. Went through the whole documentation and did some demo to get a grasp on it. Scripting is not a problem! Never released anything with it, nor have I worked with others on an AGS project, but I perform daily teamwork on large codebases so I guess it won't be a problem. Consider me proficient but still not fluent.

- As for music, my approach is very mixed. I'm a trained drummer since late 90s, plus I can play (at different extents and not professinally) guitar/bass and keyboards. I almost always produce music starting from the staff, so I usually work in a sequencer, get the arrangement done, then mix or record my parts as needed starting from there. I can then produce a full range of artefacts, from music sheets, to MIDI tracks, to digital music, to recorded stuff (even if I'm not the best in mixing and mastering, but I guess we won't go taking recorded tracks after all?). I do all my work in my home studio.So technically speaking I guess I can work things out: my tastes and fantasy may be the deal braker but for this I guess we have to try and see if I can match what you want for the game.

- As for my gaming documents, I prefer to take actual data reserved since I'm not the only interested party and my mate will eventually come back from this first months of fatherhood. On the other end I'd really really like to share how we went through the envisioning process, how we came up with puzzles structure and share with you a couple of tricks for project management and domain analysis that I use everyday, if this helps. I really don't know how far you went with "planning and documenting" but this is to me the key to allow the community to volunteer work with little overhead. I may be wrong, just applying my experience in FOSS here.

As for my favorite game... I discovered AGs with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, so I'm definitively and Indy fan. But I can't help considering the first two Monkey Island chapters my true love!

How about I share some pointers for a few musical cues?This way you can produce some melodies to start easy, and then maybe a few tunes.

Keep in mind that we have those two very strict requirements : - it's video game music. It means: ambiant music. Something that can't be a glorious musical track, but instead something that gives a place a unique atmosphere BUT doesn't get drilled into the player's head after just 10 minutes.- it's Indiana Jones so it has to sound like John Williams